Category: Startups

Canva CEO Melanie Perkins will tell us about the journey to a $15B valuation at Disrupt

The design space has undergone major changes in the last decade. What once was dominated by a single player in Adobe has now become a burgeoning software landscape, with a handful of major players answering the needs of designers across every industry. One such player is Canva, the startup valued…

Read More

Politico sells, Forbes SPACs and Vice cuts

The Equity crew felt that there was enough media news out recently that we simply had no choice but to fire up a Twitter Space and have a chat. The above episode is a discussion of a few things, in a loose and relaxed manner, so don’t take any of…

Read More

Playbook, which aims to be the ‘Dropbox for designers,’ raises $4M in round led by Founders Fund

When Jessica Ko was head of design at Google and then Opendoor, she realized that her teams spent about 90% of their time digging around Dropbox looking for assets. In many cases, they’d find older versions. Or they couldn’t find what they were looking for. Or even worse, they’d accidentally…

Read More

PawaPay raises $9M seed backed by MSA, 88mph and Mr Eazi’s Zagadat Capital

When companies create digital payments-facing solutions for African countries outside Nigeria and South Africa, building around mobile money is key. It’s literally a no-brainer. The concept is ubiquitous in East Africa, but since mobile money is a telecom operators-led initiative, there are technical complexities in creating a unified infrastructure for…

Read More

The SEC and the DOJ just charged this startup founder with fraud, saying he lied to Tiger and others

Today, both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Manish Lachwani, cofounder of a mobile app testing company Headspin, with fraud. The SEC says he violated antifraud provisions and the civil penalties it’s seeking include a permanent injunction, a conduct-based injunction, and an officer and…

Read More

Dawn Aerospace conducts five flights of its suborbital spaceplane

While the rocket launch sector is quickly becoming crowded, the same can’t be said for companies developing suborbital spaceplanes. This means there’s plenty of room to grow for startups like Dawn Aerospace, which has now completed five test flights of its Mk-II Aurora spaceplane that is designed to fly up…

Read More